Hi Michael....

On   5 Nov, this message from Robert E Brose II echoed through cyberspace:

quoted

The problem is that the controlfb driver doesn't recognize more than
2 megs of vram. This particular Mac 7500 has 4 megs installed which
works perfectly in MacOS.

Strange. It should detect 4 meg in 2.2 kernels; but maybe not 2.4
kernels.

Is that with a patch that produces a different controlfb.c that the
one on the paulus site?

quoted

With 2.2.18pre18, 2 megs only is available. Running XFree86-3.3.6-11.2
on the Mac 7500 will do 800x600 in 24 bits as expected and 1024x768 in
16 bits but not 1024x768 in 24 bits (not enough ram).

Correct according to what it detects. Wrong detection, however :-(

Yeah, I just wanted to see if it would do 24/32 bit color at all....

quoted

With 2.4.0-test10 (which includes dma and parameter line changes in
controlfb)

Which are those?

Yours I think. I passed through your website looking. I guess I was not
very clear here, sorry. I was looking at the 2.2.18pre18 paulus code.
the controlfb.c did not have the dma routines in it. The 2.4.0-test10
paulus tree did. I diffed the 2 controlfb.c files from these 2 versions.

quoted

forcing the video ram to 4 megs works fine for console
modes (for example vmode 17 32) HOWEVER when the XF86_FBdev server
is run it locks up the machine with a black screen of death. (not
pingable, keyboard is dead, etc).
Also, building my own Xfree 4.01 server results in the same black
screen of death.

Strange....

Also, do you se anything in your logs (kernel panic, maybe)? If not, can
you attach a serial console to one of the serial ports, and add this to
your kernel command line:

console=ttyS0,19200n8 console=tty0

This would be for a 19200 console, obviously. Try to capture the panic
message (if there is one) when you start X.

Nothing in the logs. I'll try the console as you suggest and post
the results. I try not to do this too much because it crashes hard
enough that I have to do a manual fsck to get it back up.

--
Bob Brose
bob@kunk.jriver.com


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